YouTube have recently modified the statistics they give on videos. The feature that caught my eye is called Hotspots. It’s an interesting concept, but I don’t think it’s fully thought out yet. Either that, or the help doesn’t explain it well enough.

The idea, according to YouTube, is to show “The ups and downs of viewership at each moment in your video, compared to videos of similar length. The higher the graph, the hotter your video: fewer viewers are leaving your video and they may also be rewinding to watch that point in the video again.”

So it’s comparing your video against all other videos for something like how many people are watching it compared to the same point in other videos. Nice idea, but it leads to some very weird graphs. I’ve included two examples of videos of mine. One has over 17,000 views, the other has over 22,000 views, so there should be enough data for a statistically valid sample.

How on earth do you interpret these graphs? Where’s the actionable insight? The second graph makes it look like more people are watching the end of my video than are watching the start, which is clearly nonsense!

I think it would be better if there was another graph that just showed the viewership for your own video at each point, without reference to other videos. The graph would nearly always be a line descending from a high point at the start, it would probably just be a question of how quickly the line drops off. But I think that would give people much more actionable knowledge.

That’s what analytics really comes down to: actionable insights. What can I do as a result of seeing this piece of data?